[GLLUG] Subversion & Bug Tracking Panel

[Richard Houser]

Charles Ulrich wrote:
> On Thursday 01 March 2007 18:38, Jason Green wrote:
>> svn is quite good for small or average size projects.  
> 
> Hmm. KDE, GNOME, GCC, and quite a few other high-profile OSS projects 
> use SVN and they're generally considered large-sized projects. Are 
> there certain types of projects that you wouldn't recommend SVN for? 
> Just wondering since I'm not thoroughly familiar with the pros and cons 
> of the various version control systems.

Centralized revision control systems (subversion, CVS, etc.) are
particularly poor at handling branching or major change sets.  They
aren't even a consideration for projects that require decentralized
development (like a testing branch to develop a new, non-trivial
feature), disconnected operation, etc.  Decentralized systems thrive in
these environments.

That said, many development environments such as Psi
(http://psi.affinix.com/development) still make svn repositories
available to the outside due to the widespread support, but use
different tools internally.  Just because you see a svn repository
doesn't mean that's what the core of the project is using.

I would agree that svn is very appropriate and probably the best choice
for small/medium projects without substantial branching/or
reconciliation needs.  Centralized systems are slightly simpler for
users to understand.  There is only one repository, usually only with
one branch, etc.  If those things are needed, it just takes forever to
manually integrate things and track down the resulting bugs that the
distributed systems would have revealed on their own.

Distributed and centralized systems are really two different animals.
Just because you can get by with one model doesn't mean it's the right
process for the job at hand.  Sadly, just that happens too much in
enterprise situations :(.